You didn’t answer their question: they asked about zero as the baseline.

What’s so special about zero?

These aren’t necessarily misleading, they’re focused, and they tell a story. For example with the first, unless if you squint at the labels you might not even be able to tell if there was an increase. For the second, yea idk. The third I’d assume that you’d be wanting to look at things after a major break. The most common I’ve seen is, yes, Covid happened and it hurt. We don’t need every chart to show how much worse off we are, we want to see how recovery is progressing. As with everything, you’ve gotta use some critical thinking to see if it’s being being misleading, or if it’s adjusted for clarity.

You can also increase the maximum value of the Y Axis to make a big difference seem smaller than it really is.

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By wrongly scaled you mean starting with a value different than zero? Because they are very different things

Right? I understand that the red and green is festive, but my poor eyeballs.

Attempting to start a sentence with # angers the Reddit markup gods.

Worked. Thanks!

I don't really understand why the creator of this wouldn't include the meaning of IPO somewhere.

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Halon’s Razor would like a word.

“Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.”

I mean this is what FP&A and investor relations do as a job. It’s great

Most of the issues with these would be resolved by including indicators of variance (e.g., error bars).

so basically what half of the graphs on this sub do

In scientific papers they'll generally have some measure of variance, and a readership that knows how to interpret it.

Can you show me your data that these 'common practices' are being used to mislead more often than they are being used to accurate represent data?

I’ve got your back, bro

All of them probably used - try this: https://econ.st/3Fbjawx

Not true. Stocks are divided into preferred and common stocks. The difference is that preferred stocks don't have voting rights; common stocks do.

I know the US government bought preferred stocks, but don't know how much. So, this could imply the US government wasn't the "true main shareholders".

You can use all the correct scales, the correct timeframes, the right type of graph. But you should always attempt to understand the context behind why the data is being presented to you at all.

Baseline selection. I see this one alot where people will show values relative to a baseline year or whatever, but the baseline is cherry-picked to fit their narrative.

This is a good point in that these presentations CAN be used to mislead but can be used to highlight useful information. But they should be transparent and provide that context.

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The problem is that while all these issues can indicate a manipulative data presentation, there are also use-cases where each of them does make sense.

For example, if you look at stock prices, it is usually not informative to see them plotted as absolute numbers, as the viewer is normally only interested in the changes - which would be under-represented or even invisible with two almost identical bars.

Same with the double Y-axes: it can be useful to plot two different types of charts on top of each other, and then it is useful to have two axes. For example, you can have absolute values on one chart and percentage change on the other.

And last but not least: sometime only the last three years are indeed interesting.

But in general: very good overview :-)

I think I'm going to do this in my next data meeting. You may have just saved my job.